ORBII Helpers: The App for People Who Come When Someone Calls

Most safety apps stop at the alert. Something happens, a notification goes out, and what occurs after that is somebody else’s problem.

That gap is the actual problem. An alert that nobody acts on is a record of an emergency, not a response to one.

So we are building the other half: ORBII Helpers, a separate app for the people who agree to turn up.

What it does

You go on duty when you want to. One toggle. While it is on, your location is shared so we can send you the nearest emergency, and your phone shows a permanent notification the entire time. Off duty, nothing is shared and nobody is sent to you.

You get sent the closest emergency, not a broadcast. ORBII dispatches by distance, in waves of three.

You navigate to them inside the app.

You confirm arrival with a code they read out to you. This is the part that matters most, and it is worth explaining properly.

Arrival is proven, not claimed

The person who called for help has a four-digit code on their screen. When you are physically standing with them, they read it aloud and you type it in.

You cannot tap “I’ve arrived.” There is no such button, and there never will be.

The reason is a failure mode we designed the whole dispatch system around. An emergency that people have arrived at but nobody has resolved is the most dangerous state in the system, because it looks handled. Helpers were sent, helpers got there, everything reads green, and the person is still in trouble.

If arrival could be self-reported, one helper could silence the entire escalation from the car park. Because it cannot, ORBII knows the difference between “someone is on the way” and “someone is actually there”, and keeps sending people until the second one is true.

You do not need to be verified to help

Worth being blunt about, because the existence of a verified-responder app makes people assume the opposite.

Any ORBII user near an emergency gets the alert and can respond. No signup, no documents, no approval. At the density we are at today, ordinary users nearby are the only responders that exist, and a neighbour who comes is worth more than a verified stranger who does not.

Verification buys accountability, not permission. A verified helper has confirmed who they are, which matters when they are being sent to a stranger at 2am. It does not give them exclusive rights to help.

Why it is a separate app

The honest answer is that the two apps need opposite things from you.

ORBII holds as little about a woman as it possibly can. Her voice never leaves her phone. Her location is off until she turns it on. Her route for the day is deleted at midnight. Under-18s are not tracked at all.

ORBII Helpers holds enough to be accountable for a rescue. A verified identity. Continuous location while on duty.

Both are correct, for their own user. But one app would need a permission set that is the union of both, and that combined app is exactly the “safety app that quietly tracks you” that people are right to distrust.

Splitting them is how each one gets to be honest about what it does. Same network underneath, so a helper going on duty is dispatchable immediately, but two apps, two purposes, two very different promises.

What we are asking for

Verification means Aadhaar, PAN and a photo of you, captured through the camera rather than picked from your gallery. That restriction exists because letting someone upload a file is an invitation to upload a photo of somebody else’s ID, and the entire point is confirming that the person holding the phone is the person on the document.

Those documents go to private storage only ORBII can open, are used once, and are never shown to the people you help. They do not appear in the main app. We do not sell or share them.

Each document is reviewed on its own, so a blurry photo sends back that one photo with a reason, not your whole application.

Where it is

In development. It is not on Google Play yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise on a page about a safety product. The main ORBII app is live and free today, and its Voice SOS, circle alerts and one-tap 112 all work now.

If you want to be told when Helpers opens, or you want to help build it, get in touch.

The thing we are actually building

A safety app is only as good as the people it can reach.

Voice SOS solves the first problem: getting a call for help out of a phone you cannot reach, offline, on a locked screen. It works, it is shipping, and it is genuinely hard technology.

But it is only half a system. The other half is a network of people close enough and willing enough to arrive, and a way of knowing they actually did.

That is what ORBII Helpers is for.

See both apps · Download ORBII